There’s been one of those digital conferences going on in London.
No, I didn’t go. Covid numbers are on the up and I didn’t fancy becoming a statistic. I read about it.
It looked like it was the usual group of IT people talking to the usual group of IT people.
Chief nurse, Ruth May was telling us to appoint digital ‘chief-nursing-information-officers’. Appointing a few more nurses might have been a better message.
The new Data Guardian said the public doesn’t trust the NHS with its data and in-so-doing managed to trash the life’s work of her predecessor. She didn’t say what she was going to do, new or different.
An insider told me the rest was the usual swirl of confusion and the splash of tears from suppliers who can’t get a look-in.
Tim Ferris, chief digital something-or-other, did his usual speech about pandemic recovery, capacity, inequalities, joined-up working and ‘doing things differently’.
That all rings a bell… who doesn’t talk about pandemic recovery, capacity, inequalities, joined-up working and ‘doing things differently’?
Pandemic recovery? That’ll start when the pandemic’s over. All the numbers I’ve seen would seem to say it isn’t.
Capacity? We haven’t had since before the pandemic, when ambulances were queuing outside hosptials and waiting lists were already at a record high of about 4.5million.
Apart from giving granny an iPad to stay in bed at home, and call it a virtual ward, which is full of risk and uses more skilled people, there’s nothing on the horizon that digital is likely to fix.
Inequalities are the work of lifetimes. Well beyond the life of a Parliament or the purview of the NHS, however ‘digital’.
Joined-up working might be on the horizon if ICOs can ever get themselves organised and their heads banged together… and…
… doing things differently… what things and how different?
Ferris’s home town, Massachusetts General Hospital, tried to do things differently by introducing a production-line surgical technique called ‘overlapping’.
Basically, concurrent surgery. Surgeons play a game of plate spinning, doing several operations at once. It ran into problems.
The Senate Finance Committee has since held hearings on the subject and issued a report highlighting concerns about the practice.
The NHS is boxed in and there isn’t anything, I can see, in the digital box of tricks that’s likely to get us out of the box. ‘Digital’ is still in the box marked irrelevant.
What is Digital Health?
Mobile health apps (we now have to call them mHealth), electronic health records (EHRs), electronic patient records (EPRs), wearable devices, telehealth and telemedicine… and something called ‘personalised medicine’… like medicine can be anything else.
Why do we need it? The digital snake oil salesmen will say something like;
‘…to improve access to your health information, to support your clinician’s decision making, your safety and continuity of care.’
Mmmm. Dunno…
If we had enough people to staff the NHS safely, none of this would matter.
But, we don’t have and won’t have for, probably, two training cycles for doctors… twenty years… and three cycles of nurse training, nine years, plus everyone else in the meanwhile.
Forget the digital brouhaha, we need three things;
- Good data, properly analysed
- Systems that speak to each other
- Stuff that is easy to use
How do we do it?
We recruit the nation; ‘to make healthcare safer and better and more economic’.
We tell people;
Their own data is of no use, other than to them.
Their data, alongside someone like them, might throw up some useful comparisons.
All our data, together, gives us the answer to the five Coeus Questions, the most important in healthcare:
- who gets sick;
- and why;
- what fixed them up;
- what did it cost;
- do we want to do it again?
Tell people we want their data and not their name and address.
Their help to be part of the millions answering the five questions. Then show them the results. How they are helping achieve better, safer, quicker, cost-effective healthcare.
Make them as proud as a blood-donor.
Systems that speak to each other… take over all procurement do it from the centre, pass a law to make interoperability mandatory and stop messing around.
Stuff that is as easy to use… as FaceBook, WhatsApp, Twitter and Tesco online… that way we won’t need digital nurses, digital porters, or digital physiotherapists because the public is already… digital.
… and we can probably make digital conferences history.
News and Comment from Roy Lilley
Contact Roy – please use this e-address roy.lilley@nhsmanagers.net
Reproduced at thetrainingnet.com by kind permission of Roy Lilley.
